The majority of employees express dissatisfaction with their shared office spaces, which influences their health, well-being, productivity and social relationships at work. This dissatisfaction stems mainly from the environmental conditions, such as the lack of noise insulation, inappropriate lighting or conflicts between colleagues regarding their preferred room temperatures.
Therefore, SONATA, an international project funded by the Horizon Europe Program, aims to explore how adaptive architecture could be used in order to improve environmental conditions and hence, workers’ health and well-being in modern workplaces.
The consortium for this project includes leading experts and institutions across Europe, who will combine their knowledge and aspirations for the development of cutting-edge technologies and designs to improve workplaces.
All the technologies will be tested in the controlled environment of the “Aachen Workplace Simulation Lab”, led by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Marcel Schweiker, who is leading the Healthy Living Spaces lab group at the Institute of Occupational, Social and Environmental Medicine at RWTH Aachen University, and in the field in living laboratories both in Aachen and in Perugia, Italy.
The project’s launch meeting was scheduled on the 1st and 2nd February 2024 at the Belgian University KU Leuven. In this meeting all 16 partners were there to meet each other and establish a common ideology for the following steps of the project.
The 16 partners come from 10 different European countries and include university partners such as the University KU Leuven, the University of Aachen, the University of Perugia, the University of Ljubljana, the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, the Masaryk University and strategic research and development parties such as the Green Building Council Italia, EValTECH, the Architects’ Council of Europe, UN Studio, BGRID, DeltaLight, SageGlass, Rockwool, the Workplace Innovation Europe and BLDG by Marc Hoppermann.
